When my dad was a young married man he bought a house with an attached ruined building and an orchard and 3 acres of land for the princely sum of £300… it was a lot of money back then.

So, some five years later he has moved up in his career and is offered a company funded pension plan, on retirement or at the age of 55, whichever comes sooner, he will be paid the princely sum of £2,000.

Enough to buy SIX of those properties, gimme some of that.

So the years went by and on the day this vast amount of money became due to him it so happened that there was a half page advert in the local paper, a new Mini (the old Leyland mini 1000, not the new BMW thing with the same name) on the road was £2,015, so his monster pension pot would not quite buy a brand new very small car.

As it happens, I had at the same time a bunch of papers from my then employer telling me all about the pension scheme everyone with a brain was signing up for, just take em home, read all the benefits, sign em and return em, and everyone was.

I didn’t.. I was the ONLY one there who didn’t, because I had seen my dad’s face when that mind bogglingly huge pension lump sum cheque was sat on the table next to the paper open at the mini advert.

GOT

FUCKING

CONNED

and so, I resolved then and there not to contribute to any of these schemes, and when you are too old to work enough to earn a crust you die…

I then spent the next 30 years being told by all and sundry what a stupid fuck I was, and the older I got the more incredulous the abuse… why even if you saved HALF your income you still won’t have enough to retire…

So far, in 2012, not one of those fuckers has said a damn thing to me, on the contrary, they are all looking both quiet and worried, as two very unpleasant truths start to dawn;

Just like many other people, by the time the pension became due, the pot had long since vanished.

So this thing you have been going without for and saving for and planning your swansong to be funded by is either simply not going to go anywhere near as far as you were planning, or increasingly likely, will effectively vanish into thin air leaving you without a pot to piss in.

Thankfully, in my dad’s case, he never really believed in the whole pension thing, so by the time the OPEC crisis hit and the world credit bubble started he still had plenty working years left, and could see the writing on the wall, s0 dad invested his earnings wisely in cases of fine Cognac (which he drank) Cigarette boats (which he ran like he stole them) Cabaret and Parties, fine food, fine clothes and fine living, yachts and year long cruises… he wasted the rest of educating us kids… lol

He’s dead now so I can’t ask him if he knew that the lessons learned in how to not quite cavitate the 500 hp boat engines were at least as valuable to a 12 year old boy as fucking latin verbs…. 40 years later the fucking latin doesn’t still raise a smile, memories of the 12 year old me alone not merely at the helm but in the boat (“Don’t redline the motors boy” was the extent of the paternal advice… lol) alone in it and in sole control of it do.

Even then I can remember a lot of the other guys had shares in boats and shit, dad was one of the few who owned outright, and it was down to NOT paying a penny into a pension.

Of course things were a lot tighter in my life than during the 50’s and 60’s and early 70’s when dad was living the life of Riley, but I still always threw caution to he wind and spent every penny I earned on wine wimminz and song as it were, and I too can’t say I regret a fucking penny of it.

Those days are now gone, even if you have a damn good trade and ex-pat somewhere where the wages are high and the tax bill is zero, you still can’t life that fat, because the cost of everything has gone up so much more than wages have.

If you are a CASH multimillionaire you can do it, just about, but it seems that along with the relative costs of things, the relative quality of people has gone down too.

Cash multimillionaires now throw it all at houses and Bentley’s and Patek Phillipe watches, you don’t see any of them (apart from the odd exception that proves the rule) howling around at the helm of a twin lambo powered cougar, or seeing how fast you can get the L88 from Paris to Marseilles, or just hopping on the knuck and cruising around for a month or two.

Cash multimillionaires now smell of perfume and moisturiser, not 40 weight oil and 98 octane and Brylcreem and Old Spice.

Cash multimillionaires now got it by winning a lottery jackpot or asset stripping with a pen, not by working in the jungle or at the wellhead or by the sweat of their brows.

So called “asset” millionaires and multimillionaires are even fucking worse, their lives are little more than a repetitive cycle of pass the ponzi parcel and spending and earning numbers ON SOMEONE ELSE’S COMPUTER SCREEN, similarly all their so called “assets” are actually recorded on someone else’s computer screen.

The only thing any of these fuckers will be left with is the debt / liability, and how is someone without a pot to piss in going to persuade either the person who absconded with their pension funds to cough up, or the person who they are underwater in debt to to write off the debt?

In the middle east, debt = jail, so a lot of the ex pats, when the wheels fall off the wagon, dump everything, dump the car and the airport and return to their native lands with sweet fuck all.

But what do you do when the wheels falls off the wagon in your native lands, and debt does not = prison, but something far worse, indentured servitude by any other name.

You can’t just bug out.

“Don’t get into debt” / “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” is great advice.

Better advice is never trust anything you do not hold and control in your own hands.

Better advice still is never trust your continued possession of anything you personally cannot not just touch at will, but pick up and carry at will.

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Congrats on your old man. Mine bought the pension ponzi-scheme hook, line and sinker.
Worked his ass off for the Germans, on the yearly “vacation” pilgrimaged back to the “motherland” eternally gluing the small rinky-dink house into a less unfinished state, became unemployed well before pension age to finally croak of Asbestos-lung. Alone and probably fountaining blood in the hospice.

Taught me all about the fruits of hard work that I need to know.
As they say, monkey see monkey NOT do.